Brace yourself, London. HRH Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy is coming. The heir apparent to the defunct throne of Italy, who styles himself Prince of Piedmont and Venice but has lived 30 of his 42 years in exile, is a banker turned TV personality who won Italy’s version of Strictly Come Dancing by the biggest-ever popular vote (1.3 million).

He and his fêted French actress wife Clotilde Courau and daughters Vittoria and Luisa live a jet-set life between Monte Carlo, Geneva, Paris and Italy. Now London will be factored into that hectic commute as the “prince without a crown” has set up a film production company, Savoy & Gregory, in Covent Garden with an estimated £15 million of finance already secured and four films planned. He comes to our meeting at the May Fair hotel flanked by a PR and his business partner.

Demian Lee Gregory is a young Italian-American producer, small, dark and intense in contrast to HRH’s languid, tawny Eurofabulousness and also — how to put this? — more focused on details.

“We met two months ago…” says the prince. “Three months ago,” says Gregory. “We met three months ago,” continues the prince, unabashed, “and now we are married and he is waiting for a kid. And the kid is a film.”

Their plans include an animated historical story and an all-female British comedy called Annie has Body Issues. But their association began when Gregory contacted the prince out of the blue about a documentary he was planning on Federico Fellini and was duly summoned, not to a castle or château but to the Parisian Starbucks.

“I met Fellini I think in 1992 or 1993…” says the prince. “He died in 1992,” interjects Gregory. “In 1992, I met him with the painter Balthus, who is a friend of mine, and we had a beautiful lunch,” the prince says. “I discovered a genius, in his way of thinking, of looking and his creativity.” He was immediately enthused by the documentary idea.

Production partner: “He comes with his little face like that and says he has an idea — a documentary on me,” says the prince of Demian Lee Gregory, pictured (Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)

“For the second project,” the prince adds, gesturing affably at Gregory, “he comes with his little face like that and says he has another idea which is a documentary on me. I say, on me? But why? I’m 42, I don’t have a life of a documentary to be made. But he had a very interesting angle. We have documentaries on royal families, on normal people like rock stars. But something people have difficulty to understand is this line between both. Yes, I come from an important family. Yes, I have a big name. Yes, my family unified Italy and ruled over Italy. But today I am Prince of Venice in a country that is a republic, where titles are not recognised.”

Time for a bit of historical context. The House of Savoy was founded in 980 and became the ruling monarchy in Italy for 85 years after unification in 1861. In 1946 the prince’s fascism-tainted great-grandfather abdicated, but his grandfather Umberto II ruled for just a month before Italy voted to become a republic.

The king, queen and all male heirs were exiled and all their goods sequestered. The prince’s dad had to go to work as a businessman and the prince was born into exile, albeit one that involved a private Swiss education and frequent trips to London “to see my friends from school, to party and to shop”.

He was brought up to understand the full weight of his heritage, and the full realisation that it had gone, but is astute enough to refer to his “suffering” in “virgolette” (inverted commas).

“Certainly I would not compare my exile to a young boy from Syria who needs to run off with just a plastic bag over his shoulder,” he concedes. “My family had much more chance [opportunity] but we left Italy with nothing. My father worked all his life and I have to work.”

The prince hoped to study architecture at 18 but instead fell into the world of finance in Geneva for 15 years, first for the Republic National Bank of New York and then at Syz Bank. He never used his title, “except perhaps to take girls”. One of these, apparently, was Kate Moss. He has previously admitted to a six-month affair with the model in 2001, after they were introduced by his old friend Marianne Faithfull, but now he is coy: “Ha ha. I met her a long time ago and she is a very nice woman, very intelligent and someone I like a lot. A gentleman never says [discusses] those things.”

Despite such charming distractions, he yearned for Italy and likens living just across its border to “a man on a diet who lives underneath a chocolate factory that is closed to him”.

Eventually, the family brokered a return from exile in 2002, and the Prince and his family were received by Pope John Paul II on their first visit. It probably helped that Umberto II left the Turin Shroud “which my family bought privately before we were kings of Italy, in 1400 or something” to the nation on his death in 1983.

Prince Emanuele with actress wife Clotilde Courau — 'I wanted to knock her out to gain her heart,' he says

Anyway, Emanuele returned to the country he loved to find it didn’t love him but regarded him instead as spoiled. He set out to prove them wrong. There was a fashion brand, Prince of Italy, some memoirs and a novel, and a bid for the European Parliament five years ago where he canvassed “in markets and at fairs and learned a lot” but lost.

When he joined the ballroom dancing show the viewing audience — most of whom wouldn’t remember the monarchy — responded to him as a man rather than a prince. He began presenting, then formed his own TV production company, Royal Me Up (“like the Stones song, Start Me Up”), and now the film company. His documentary about his life will therefore be a study in the power of money, monarchy and media, and it will be called Derailments “because I am like a train that derails. But I always arrive at the destination station I wanted. Perhaps even faster than all the others.”

There is a weird synchronicity between Emanuele’s relationship with his homeland and with his wife, who he met in a charity fencing bout organised by Prince Albert in Monaco.

“She comes from a family… I don’t like to say poor… but she had to work to pay for her studies, to fight for what she wanted,” he says. “Like a lot of people, to her I represented the Antichrist: the handsome prince who arrives with the white horse and the blue cape and thinks everyone owes him something. She wanted to knock me down because I was everything she hated in all her life. I wanted to knock her out to gain her heart because I was a bit in love already; she was very beautiful and very intriguing. So I win — not very gentlemanly I must say — and we begin speaking that night together at dinner.”

I ask if the scar on his chin is a fencing wound. “No, everything [on my body] is from motorcycles: the fencing wound is in my heart, man,” he says, thumping his chest.

Gradually, he won Courau round and they married in 2003. Vittoria was born in 2004, Luisa in 2007. Their three names scroll around a dagger tattoo on his forearm, “in case I come in late and forget them”. He’s based in Monte Carlo, his wife and children in Paris, but they “make time to meet”.

It was Courau who made him go to the doctor when he had breathing problems, resulting in the removal of “benigno” tumours from his nasal septum in 2011 and 2012 and he constantly praises her beauty, intelligence and talent.

He dotes on his girls. “Today having male heirs is very démodé — out of fashion. I think 75 per cent of European monarchies now have female heirs; Sweden, Belgium, Spain — Felipe, who just became king, has two daughters.” Besides, there is no Italian monarchy to inherit.

The Prince has hopes that new PM Mario Renzi will be a new broom for Italy but says he is “cross and angry” with his country’s inability to invest in and promote its cultural heritage.

London promotes its culture, he says, “there is a dynamism on the streets and a mixing of cultures which is incredible”. England’s film industry is livelier than Italy’s, with better tax breaks, and here he can live European while making movies in a language Hollywood understands. He is currently looking for “a little apartment”.

I ask HRH Prince Emanuele Filiberto Umberto Reza Ciro René Maria di Savoia if his title is an asset in the film industry. “It would be a lie saying it does not open doors but if you don’t have something interesting to sell or speak about, doors quickly close,” he says suavely. I think, like his wife and the Italian people, we would be foolish to underestimate him.